This was such a tough episode to record! I've had it swirling in my head for months and I did multiple takes at recording it (it's why I'm so late with it!). It's still a bit rambly but I think I got there in the end. AI does freak me out but it piques my curiosity at the same time. And I've learned that it doesn't make me replaceable - but I have had to adjust how I serve my customers and clients and that's what I talk about in this episode - how to double down on being a human creative with a business.
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
This was such a tough episode to record! I've had it swirling in my head for months and I did multiple takes at recording it (it's why I'm so late with it!). It's still a bit rambly but I think I got there in the end. AI does freak me out but it piques my curiosity at the same time. And I've learned that it doesn't make me replaceable - but I have had to adjust how I serve my customers and clients and that's what I talk about in this episode - how to double down on being a human creative with a business.
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
Speaker 1:
Hello everyone and welcome to the February Premium Subscriber episode of the and she Looked Up podcast. Before we dive in today, of course, I just want to thank you all so much for your ongoing financial support of the show. You are the engine that makes the show run and for that I am very grateful. Actually, this week I recorded a new sponsored intro for the podcast. So up until now it has been my illustration business that sponsors the show, but I decided that it was time that that changed because, thanks to all of you financially supporting the show, you are actually the ones that keep the show going and I think that needs to be recognized to the rest of the podcast's community. So again, thank you all so much for that. I also wanted to mention that I am going to be opening up a free Patreon community. They will not get access to these podcasts, but Patreon is the only place where I can kind of create a bit of a community around the show and just share odd things here and there that I would like or that I think you all might be interested in. Again, only paid members of the community will get access to these podcasts and possibly other things down the road, I don't know, but the reason I wanted to mention it is because several of you still here support us on Buzzsprout, which you are more than welcome to do, but unfortunately, buzzsprout doesn't give me the ability to post additional content throughout the month. It only gives me the ability to upload a podcast, and so I just wanted to let all of you know that, if you're supporting us on Buzzsprout, you might want to go over and join the free community on Patreon, where I'll be able to post some of the. You know, it's just for things like if I come across a link that I think you all might be interested in, or an article that's really interesting, or an interesting take on something we've covered in one of the episodes, I thought that that would be a good place that I can put it where. Hopefully you'll see it. I can share these things on Instagram, but they really don't get seen. It's just, it's challenging, it's just the way social media works. So I wanted to give this a try and, as I said, if you're supporting us on Buzzsprout, I'm more than welcome to stay there, and you will still get access to these podcasts. That's not going anywhere, but if you're hoping to maybe see some of the other bits and pieces or interact with other members of the community. You might want to head over to Patreon to check that out. It's patreoncom forward slash and she looked up, so I wanted to let all of you know about that.
Speaker 1:
This week, I wanted to talk about something. This has been on my mind for quite a while and I've put off talking about it because I'm not sure that I'm going to cover it in the right way. I don't know, I've been sort of back and forth on this, but if you listened to the podcast last week the last episode that Heather and I did together we got into some of the trends that we see happening out there in the maker space, the creator space, the small business space and the ones that we are going to try and focus on within our own businesses, and, of course, that led to a conversation about generative AI, which is something that we just can't afford to ignore at this point for so many reasons, and I wanted to go a little deeper into it because I think it's very frightening for all of us for many different reasons, and I would be lying if I said it doesn't freak me out. There are aspects of generative AI that I find very concerning, particularly when it comes to video and deep fakes and things that can be used from a political perspective, things that can be used to take advantage of other people. With any new technology, there is always somebody who is going to take it and abuse it, and, unfortunately, the legislation around the use of AI and what we can do with it is behind it's, behind the times, as it usually is with any new technology. It takes governments a while to catch up and, as I mentioned in that episode, there are lawsuits happening and they are moving on it. But it's going to be very interesting this year because we have some very big global elections coming up and it'll be interesting. It has the potential to take propaganda to a whole new level and that's very concerning. But for us, for those of us who create daily, I think the more immediate concern for a lot of us is copyright and using our material, and also, for me, the biggest fear is becoming redundant. That has been the thing that has been on my mind with generative AI for quite some time, and so for those of you who maybe aren't aware I think most of you are at this point I am a graphic designer, I'm a writer and I'm also an illustrator, but when it comes to revenue, what I earn in a month, the bulk of my revenue comes from writing, with graphic design being a close second and illustration being a distant third, so I really rely on writing.
Speaker 1:
The type of writing I do is email marketing and some copywriting, so those are things that a lot of people are starting to use tools like chat GPT to help them with in their businesses, because hiring a copywriter or somebody to do email marketing or other types of writing can be very expensive, and so that is something that I immediately got panicky about like why would anyone want to hire me if they can get a tool like chat GPT to generate content for free, or maybe hire a VA for a lot less than they pay me to prompt chat GPT to create this content? And it's definitely something that I think about all the time. As a graphic designer, I have been thinking about this for a very long time. Graphic design is a little bit different, because we've actually been dealing with this for a very long time in our industry. Photoshop is an AI tool, and, if I am being very honest, photoshop is what convinced me that I could become a graphic designer.
Speaker 1:
I wanted to be a graphic designer. Back in high school I was told over and over again by well meaning teachers and adults that I didn't have the drawing skills or the art skills to go into that field, and so I didn't. And it wasn't until much later, when I went back to school again as an adult and had to take a Photoshop class for something I was doing, that I realized that there was a tool now, along with Adobe Illustrator and other tools in the Adobe suite, that could take the ideas in my head and turn them into something that would have the quality required to go into this field. All of a sudden, something I had wanted to be since I was a teenager but had always been told I wasn't good enough, opened up to me, and I think this is true in a lot of visual arts.
Speaker 1:
The other place where this kind of came about was photography. I spoke about this on the podcast last week. Photography, when it was film, was a very expensive profession to go into, a very expensive hobby to go into. There was a whole process behind taking pictures. You didn't want to waste film, so you had to get your framing correct and your lighting correct right from the get go. Then there was the whole process of developing the film and suddenly digital cameras came on the scene and they essentially democratized photography. They made it much more inexpensive to participate. They made it possible for people to learn much more inexpensively than they could before, because you could practice without worrying that you were wasting film. And that's essentially what the Adobe suite did for design. It democratized it. It made it accessible to people who up until that point, didn't think it was accessible because of technology and AI that is built into the software to help you do things like remove backgrounds and create straight lines and all of those things. That is all artificial intelligence, and if we go by that, then I've been an artificial intelligence or an AI assisted graphic designer my entire career at this point. So it's something that all industries face and in graphic design, about 10 years ago suddenly Fiverr and Upwork came on the scene and you could hire somebody to create graphics for you for $5.
Speaker 1:
And then the big one that came along in recent years is Canva. Canva suddenly took a lot of the things that you could do in Adobe tools and gave them to people for free. And not only did they give them to people for free, but they gave them massive asset libraries with elements and photographs and graphics and shapes and grids and frames and all these tools that previously you would have had to pay monthly for Photoshop. And to give you an idea, as a graphic designer I pay $80 Canadian a month to have the full Adobe suite. But for the average person, they don't need that. They just want to make a social media graphic. And now all of a sudden they have all these tools in front of them, along with beautifully designed templates, and I thought, for sure, okay, this is really going to impact whether people need to hire me or not. So you see, even illustration, now we have.
Speaker 1:
We have tablets. I mean, we've had tablets for a long time. We've had, you know there's. There was Wacom, or Wacom, however you like to say it, and Cintiq tablets and a lot of digital artists use those tablets. Game, video game designers use those tablets like, again, you're using technology to get what's in your head out and so.
Speaker 1:
But the iPad and Procreate again democratize this. It became affordable to be able to create digital graphics and to have digitally or have assisted drawing, which has some benefits. There are a lot of tools in Procreate that make it so that people who have things like Parkinson's and stuff there are tools in there that can allow them to continue to create and produce smooth lines and have assisted techno, have I am having a really hard time saying this, but basically assisted drawing, which again democratizes it. It brings it to more people, and so it's very easy to suddenly think, oh no, why would anyone hire me? And I think about this all the time, and I'm sure it is something that many of you have also thought about why would anybody hire me if they can just talk to a computer screen and have it generate what they need? And what I started to realize is that, no, it hasn't affected my income, if anything. I am busier now, much busier now than I was a year ago, and I was busier a year ago than I was the year before.
Speaker 1:
And because what I started to notice is that people using Canva didn't make it, didn't. It doesn't make them a graphic designer, it doesn't make them somebody who is trained in the visual arts and I'm not talking about whether you went to school to do something or whether you're self taught. To me that doesn't matter. You can be come just as skilled a designer or a photographer going through the self taught stream, and by self taught it I'm not necessarily saying you teach yourself how to do everything, but you have self directed would be a better way to say a self directed. You did self directed learning to become whatever it is that you chose to be, but you still did the learning and the practicing and improved your skills day by day. What I realized is that just because you have a tool, it doesn't make you good at what you do, and I mentioned this in the podcast. You know you could put me and Joe McNally in the same room with the same camera, have a shoot, the same scene, and his would still be 100 times better than mine, and I'm a decent photographer. I worked as a photographer for a while, so I'm not a bad photographer, but his skill level is miles above mine and so much better than mine will ever be.
Speaker 1:
And I think this is what started to dawn on me with things like design and writing. People were still coming to me, and a lot of them came to me after dabbling in these new technologies and realizing that A they're still maybe not creating the thing that they wanted to create. They don't understand which fonts work well together. They don't necessarily have a grasp on color theory. They take a picture out and they put a picture in and it doesn't look good. Or they move something around because the phrase they're using is longer than what the template allows for and it doesn't look right. And I've seen a lot of really bad design come out of Canva, a tool that, in all theory, should allow everyone to create beautiful things every time, but it doesn't, because not everybody has the skill set to make changes to anything.
Speaker 1:
The other thing that I noticed is that a lot of what comes out of those tools tends to be very homogenous looking, because we're all using the same templates, we're all using the same color palettes, we're all using the same fonts, and I mean this is very normal. In all creative fields we go through phases or style periods and very often we identify them by decades. You know, if I were to say to you the 1950s, a very specific type of music would come to mind, a very specific type of dress would come to mind, specific type of automobile, home decor, all of that. You would have a very vivid picture in your head of what the 1950s look like. Same with the 1980s, same with the 1930s. That's very normal in all design fields fashion, graphic design, car design, music, all of that.
Speaker 1:
But what I'm talking about is that, because it's even more accessible to us through templates, we don't experiment, we just take the first template that comes to us because we're in a hurry. I just need a Pinterest pin, I just need a website banner, I just need something fast, and so we grab something. We don't necessarily think about the message that it's sending to our audience, we don't necessarily think about how it fits in with our overall branding. So there's a lot of things we don't necessarily consider. And so this is what I started to notice.
Speaker 1:
I started to notice that people were coming to me saying I tried to make this in Canva. It didn't look good. I really need somebody who knows what they're doing. Okay, cool. I had other people who said I hired a VA to do this in Canva because it said she was good at design. It's okay, but I don't love it. Or I bought a template. It's really pretty, I love it, but I've just realized that I still have to put all the content into the template and I just don't have time to do it. Can you help me?
Speaker 1:
And it started to dawn on me that they still need a human. They still need a person who understands not just that they want something pretty to look at, but that it has to fit with their branding, that it has to be able to. I mean, one thing that trips people up, and a lot of the design I do is ebook design. They would buy a template for their ebook, and I work in a very specific niche. I work in recipe ebook design. So they would buy a template, and what they'd realize is that their recipes are really long and the templates are designed. The template they bought was designed for very short recipes, and they don't know how to make their long recipes fit into this template. The template needs to be altered and it needs to be adapted to the type of content that they create, and they don't know how to do that, and so they need some help with that. They need a human who gets what it is that they do, and so I've realized a couple of years ago that the trick to this isn't worrying about the technology. Technology is just going to keep getting better and better. Generative AI is just going to keep getting better and better. What people are looking for is the human connection, and this is what Heather and I talked about in the episode last week. We talked about doubling down on being human, and I think that is going to be the key for all of us.
Speaker 1:
There are a couple of things that I did. I'm not saying that they have made my business bulletproof. They haven't. A part of being a business owner and a working creative is that we have to keep adapting. Nothing stays the same, so that's the first thing you have to accept. You can't keep doing the same thing and expect to have continued growth or to expect to keep the same customers and clients for your work. People change, people evolve. We need to change and evolve as well, and so do our businesses. So that's the first thing. The second thing I realized was that I needed to get really specific in what it is that I do. I need to niche down, and that's what I started to do.
Speaker 1:
I work with a very specific industry and a very specific group of people within that industry. It's an industry that I have experience with, and so that helps because I understand what it is my clients are dealing with on a day to day basis. I understand what their goals are. For most of them, I know how I understand their revenue model. I know how they make money. I know what it is that they love to do at the end of the day. So I have a very good understanding of the people that I'm working with, and it allows me to really tailor the type of services and creative that I offer for sale or as a service, and the arena that I work in.
Speaker 1:
I work in the food space. I work with food content creators, so my clients could be everything from anywhere, from food bloggers, food YouTubers, chefs, cookbook authors, dieticians and nutritionists anyone who is creating content food content in the food space and once I narrowed down in on that group, it became very easy for me to target my marketing to them, became very easy for me to figure out how to get found by them, because I was really able to dial in on my SEO for my website. I knew the type of content to create that would get them interested and, most importantly, I realized that a huge component of my work was going to be word of mouth, and the best way to get good word of mouth is to provide the best customer service that you possibly can, and so that was something else that I really tried to focus in on and I'm constantly trying to get better at that. I'm constantly working on my systems, which I use AI to help me with. This is where AI can be really helpful is on the business backend side of things that it gives you.
Speaker 1:
Like I said, it makes things easier for me so that I am able to spend more time focused in on my clients and what it is that they need, and serving them and I think this is a word that we all need to get very comfortable with in our language is serving. We are here to serve a group of people, whether they are clients or customers. So whether you provide them a service or whether they are purchasing something from you and I want to make it really clear I'm not talking about creating as a hobby or as something that you don't I'm talking about specifically those of us who rely on our creativity to pay our bills, who run businesses around, our creativity. We have to come at that from a place of service, and this is where we can double down on being human. We can have those calls with our clients. We can invite them into our studios, we can show them how we do the work. We can sit down and have conversations with them on how what we have done has helped them.
Speaker 1:
So in my case because what I do is very specific I am able to sit down on a Zoom call with my clients. They can't do that with chat GPT. I'm able to show them exactly what I'm working on. I'm able to show them the layout of a book and say, you know, we could move this here, we could try this here, and show them all these different things One on one and have an in-the-moment conversation with them, which isn't something that they can easily do with AI, at least not without feeling like they're not being heard, because we've all had those moments where we sat with a chatbot a customer service chatbot, and wanted to rip our hair out because they're just not hearing us, because they're a machine. So this is particularly important with the writing side of my business because, again, I work with the same group of people. I help them with their email newsletter marketing, and anyone who has solid writing skills can write a good email newsletter. Chat GPT can write a pretty decent email newsletter and it will continue to get better at doing that.
Speaker 1:
What I'm able to do with my writing clients is to provide added value. So, instead of just writing their emails every month, I'm able to sit down with them once a quarter and we go through what we've done and we go through the stats and we talk about what worked and what didn't work. We look for trends, things they can use in other areas of their business and again there will come a point where they'll be able to do this with an AI tool, if they can't already. But it is that human connection. They like that feeling of knowing that they're talking to a human. The same with my illustration work. Although my illustration work accounts for a much smaller percentage of my business. What makes people interested in it isn't so much the work, it's the person behind it. I've talked about this before.
Speaker 1:
I did a market this Christmas where it became very apparent that people didn't realize I was the artist behind the work on the table in front of them. A lot of them thought that I was making things with artwork that I had got from somewhere else. Because a lot of people do that now. They use artwork from stock libraries. They purchase artwork that somebody else has made, not necessarily knowing how they created that artwork, but it's available to buy and they use it to create designs. They might take several pieces of artwork, combine them together to create an original design and there's nothing wrong with that. But it tends to make things look very homogenous out there.
Speaker 1:
Once we realized that people didn't know I was the artist, the friend who was helping me at that market started telling everybody. The mood changed immediately. People were so much more interested in what it is that I did. They were curious. They started asking me questions. They started taking longer to browse. They wanted to see all the different things I had done and it was a completely different vibe. It really made me think over the holiday season how I want to change, how I'm putting myself out there, because I realized that people again want to connect with the artist behind the work. They want to know who created that work. They want to know that it is the person sitting in front of them. They want to ask questions about it. They want to understand your process. I'm not creating anything big or I'm not doing incredible canvases or anything like that. I'm just an illustrator with paper and pen and I create cute, quirky, whimsical designs, that kind of appeal to kids or the kid with it. It's not great art, it is fun art. It is art that makes people smile. People still want that connection, in the same way that they want the connection with the person who creates the big, beautiful canvases Music, I think, musicians and songwriters.
Speaker 1:
Again, people connect on a very visceral level towards music because it is coming from a very shared human experience. Again, if that is what you do, if you're a musician or a songwriter, you need to bring who you are to the forefront and share yourself with the people who are interested in your work. There is space for us all out there. There is space for us to coexist with AI. I really think that the keys are niching down, figuring out what it is that you do, not being afraid to experiment. I think we need to do more experimentation. I think we need to really dive down into our creativity to create things that aren't being seen anywhere else, to bring our own unique twist to it. I think we need to connect with the people that we work with. So, whether you are serving clients because you are a service-based business, or whether you are creating product to be sold to a customer, that connection is super important. Ai is still going to be scary and it's going to make all of us nervous. I think it's going to be like that for a while, especially as we try to figure out how this is all going to shake out and as government becomes more involved, or the private sector, because I think in many ways, that's what happened with the internet.
Speaker 1:
When the internet first came out, it was such a cool place to be. There was no rules, there was no SEO. You could just do whatever you wanted and nobody cared and people would find you. So it gave a tremendous voice to people who love to write, to people who loved to share photos, for people who had ideas. Suddenly, there was all this stuff that was incredibly accessible, that hadn't been accessible before. What has happened over the couple of decades that it's been around is suddenly you have gatekeepers again. Google is a gatekeeper, metta is a gatekeeper they're all gatekeepers deciding what it is that we get to see. So right now, with AI, there really aren't any gatekeepers, but gatekeepers will come. There will be a point where you will have to pay for a lot of these services and it probably won't be cheap. There will come a point where the governments around the globe start to step in and legislate how these tools can be used. That will all come, there will be legislation around copyright and AI, and that will be very interesting to see. As Heather mentioned in the episode we did the other day, it's very important that you understand your rights in terms of your intellectual property rights when it comes to AI and really think about what you upload into AI tools and understanding how that might be used by other people. So it's very important to really understand the landscape out there and to stay informed.
Speaker 1:
Does it mean that you can't keep painting? Absolutely paint? It doesn't mean you can't keep writing. Right, we are humans. What makes us human is our ability to create, to tell stories. Whether we tell those stories with words, with written language, with visuals, with what we put on our body, it's all part of us telling a story about ourselves or telling the world a story of who we are, and that's not going to change and we still need to do that and we need people out there who can do that. So niche down, provide value, come from a place of service and double down on who you are as a human and share that with the world and stay vigilant with it.
Speaker 1:
I think those are my big key points and, I'm sorry, I think I got to it in a roundabout way. I've been struggling with this episode for a good six weeks now, trying to to get across what it is I wanted to tell you all, and that is to say that you know, ai doesn't make it's going to change how we work, but we're still going to be working. We're still going to be creating. We are still going to have people who want our work and who want our services. Yes, there will be people who will move entirely over to an AI world, and that's fine. They're not your people, but there's still going to be people who value what it is that you do. Just don't be afraid to adapt, don't be afraid to evolve and to keep learning. Those are my key points for this week, for this month. So that's it for February.
Speaker 1:
I will be back again next month with another episode, and I just wanted to remind you all that if you have something that you would like me to cover in one of these episodes, please, please, please, drop me a note. I would love to hear from you. I would love to to know what it is that I can help you with. As I mentioned before, the hardest part about doing these episodes is actually coming up with ideas that I hope will be of interest to all of you. So if you have something that you would like me to talk about, please drop me a note. You can reach me at andshelookedupatgmailcom, or you can DM me on Instagram at andshelookedup or my other Instagram account, findlimedesigns. Either those you can reach me and I would love to hear from you. So please don't be afraid to reach out. That's it for this month. I'll be back next month and I hope you all have a month of happy creating.